How To Read The Wind

Tuesday's Child Is Thinking About Elections

I’ll be back shortly to writing about the essentials about Trump and his varied constituencies, but I thought a pause was warranted to explain about why I think what I think.

How do we know what we think we know about what people do in an election means, about how to interpret the motivations of other people in voting, in participating in events, in draping themselves in the signs of their commitments to candidates, in speaking out (or remaining silent) in public culture?

This challenge is no less and no more difficult than understanding the general relationship between consciousness, identity, cognition, intention and action in reference to any other specific circumstance. Which is to say, quite difficult.

It is also the central preoccupation of all the social sciences, a central fascination within public culture in modern society, and a practical necessity in the everyday experience of all human beings.

We are built for thinking about this problem. We have become more and more aware that this cognitive task is a basic part of life for all social primates that have some kind of mental grasping of self-and-other: what are other individuals going to do? Why are they going to do it? When they’ve done it, why did they do it? Are they going to do it again? And what do I do in consequence? And at least some social primates (chimps, gorillas, baboons) shows signs that they also work hard to deceive others about their intentions, to create uncertainty about what they will do.

What we don’t know is whether that uncertainty extends into their experience of self, if they have such a thing. It does for human beings. Long before modern psychological research raised questions about whether consciousness exists and whether (or when) we take reasoned actions and exercise agency that arises from conscious intention, human philosophies, religions, and arts have fretted at the issue of whether we know ourselves, have enumerated the ways that deception and ambiguity extends deep into the fortress of our minds.

I offer these points as an over-elaborated prologue to a simpler point: the evidence of what people are thinking and feeling about politics, about their motivations and aspirations, is never going to resolve into concretized data obtained by systematic inquiry. Whether the instrument is polling, surveys, focus groups, lab experiments, or even ethnography, you will not find the evidentiary needle in the haystack that lets you say “This is what people think and this is reason they’re going to do what it seems likely they will do”. You may gain more insight by looking at what people have already done, and by looking at the constraints on the space of their action, but even there, plainly people not only surprise others and themselves with their actions but their actions do not tell you about the interiority that goes with those actions, what it’s like on the inside—and it is the inside that generates the potentiality for future action.

Evidence like polling is a form of serially opening up Schrodinger’s boxes to murder ten thousand opinion cats. But most of the time our opinions live in those boxes: those ten thousand zombies crawl right back inside after being hauled out into daylight.

What we think when we think about politics and political issues is already collapsed into the narrower topography of government, policy, law, and elections. Ask someone how they think about reproductive rights and if you have time to pull up a chair and listen to a life story, you’ll likely hear some thoughts that don’t fit inside that narrower space: feelings about individuals they’ve known, about abstract categories of persons that they don’t know, about communities they live in, about their own bodies and choices, about what they believe people should do versus their understanding of what people actually do, about religions and philosophies that go well beyond the specific topic at hand. And in many cases, what you hear won’t be all the truths that person has on hand: you’ll hear what they think is appropriate for your ears, your purposes, your truths, your imagined status—but you’ll also hear what that person wants to tell themselves, wants to feel. You won’t hear what that person doesn’t know about themselves—among other things, if they’re a woman who has never been pregnant but still could become pregnant, you’ll hear what they think they would do or would want but not necessarily what they will do and how they’ll feel about it. If there’s one thing we’re all wrong about with consistency, it is how we are going to feel in a future whose concrete contours are already knowable.

If you read this newsletter, you know that my epistemological doubts here do not keep me from making strong statements about what people think about politics, and how their thinking ties to their political actions. So what evidentiary hat am I pulling those rabbits from?

I would like to believe that my own readings are healthily generalist—that I scorn no information or data, and that I refuse various kinds of single-variable reductionism. In the end, though, I would say that I “read” the society as a vast, complex text, that this is interpretative work where there is no singular truth about what the text of political life and choice says, only passages that not only can be read as having multiple meanings but must be read that way. In this reading, inference matters. We’re talking about structures of feeling, sentiment, consciousness as much as actions taken, rallied attended, statements made, yard signs posted—and about how to think from the latter to the former.

So what, for example, does it mean that Trump’s most ardently loyal, openly proclaimed followers frequently express an indifference to or even embrace of Trump’s most brazen violations of norms, laws, and expectations? I would argue that you will never answer that question via polls, surveys or other formal research instruments because those instruments are very plainly enframed already within the working, visible epistemological infrastructure that Trump’s most dedicated followers refer back to. Those are instruments of the press, the elites, the professors. This is pretty much the dictionary definition of a Hawthorne effect: to try and make knowledge about people through an instrument that they knowingly view in an adversarial way will only produce what they want that instrument to know. For the same reason, someone like me cannot produce everyday embedded social knowledge of this group of political loyalists because they are not in my social worlds nor am I in theirs. If I lived elsewhere, lived otherwise, perhaps I could. I could do what Arlie Hochschild and other researchers have done: ethnography is one systematic method for producing an insider understanding of people outside your own social networks.

But the time and space that requires is in my own professional life devoted elsewhere. I am here thinking as a citizen about other citizens, and trying to understand the reasons why they are going to do what they seem plainly bent on doing, because not only does that help me guess at how likely they are to get what they want, but how much they want what I feel certain we are all going to get if Trump is elected.

That is, I am certain that what we will get if Trump is elected are multiple kinds of overlapping sociopolitical catastrophes that permanently change the near and medium-term of futures of everyone living in the United States (and thus people living in many other parts of the world). I am certain that what we will get is something akin to a revolution: a profound rupture in the status quo. And I am certain that rupture will be very bad for me in specific and for most of what I value and hope for in the world, in my communities of affiliation, and in my family.

What Trump’s most devoted followers think about him—and what they hope or believe he will do—is a key indicator of what kinds of catastrophes we might endure, and how catastrophic they might become. The problem here is that what they hope or believe may not be something they articulate in public thought because they know those sentiments contradict other commitments and norms that they otherwise credit. But it may also be that they hope for something that they do not know in themselves, of themselves, that they want something that they can’t articulate themselves in a clear or transparent way.

In that, if so, they are only human. We all have yearnings, good and evil, that we either refuse to speak because we are afraid of what others might think (or are ashamed to consider) or because we don’t even have the language or self-knowledge for. And yet, this is often precisely what familiar strangers—colleagues, neighbors, citizens—know about us. They see it in the pattern of what we do, in what we say and what we refuse to say, in the company we keep and the people we avoid. They see it in the expressions on our faces, in the broken moments where we are startled or angered. In the intimacies we permit and the formalities we require. In what we let slip when our guard is down and what we are guarded against.

They see it in what we are angling to be and do in the world, in where we live and what we want. They read us, as we read them, these familiar strangers whose lives happen all around us, whose diagrams overlap ours.

Every lastingly accurate—and meaningfully inaccurate—reading of political intention and political action happens through that kind of situated witnessing and interpretation. Empirical data leavens that work: you can track the numbers of people assembling in new congregations in the Great Awakening and read the changes in language and rhetoric in printed sermons, you can ennumerate the people streaming westward in Manifest Destiny, see the workers joining unions and striking despite the risks, look at the laws changed during the movements of the late 1960s. But you can’t make sense of what is happening in any of those moments without reading what wasn’t recorded, what isn’t visible, what can’t be counted. Any more than you can now. Understanding what people think together and what their thought is meant to do, might do whether it is meant or not, is not now and never will be anything but interpretative. Interpretations are not arbitrary, they are not fictions, and they are not all equally true—but they can concentrate on the same passages, the same inferences, the same mysteries and make equal, valid and opposing sense of what is read there in hearts, in minds, in speech and in action.

Image credit: Harold Anchel, “Wind”, 1935-43, Metropolitan Museum of Art collection.